Every year, consumers spend billions of dollars to purchase wearable fashion articles, which are also referred to by terms such as fashion items, fashion product (or products), and the like. Some examples of types of wearable fashion articles include clothing, footwear, jewelry, accessories, and the like. With respect to clothing, some example subtypes of wearable fashion articles include shirts, pants, tops, skirts, dresses, suits, and the like. With respect to footwear, some example subtypes of wearable fashion articles include shoes, sandals, boots, and the like. With respect to jewelry, some example subtypes of wearable fashion articles include necklaces, rings, earrings, brooches, pins, and the like. With respect to accessories, some example subtypes of wearable fashion articles include purses, messenger bags, backpacks, and the like. And certainly numerous other examples of types and subtypes of fashion articles could be listed as well.
Many of the transactions by which consumers purchase fashion articles occur at retail locations; such transactions are often referred to as “brick-and-mortar” transactions. It is becoming increasingly common, however, for consumers to purchase fashion articles by engaging in what are often referred to as electronic-commerce (e-commerce) transactions, which are quite often conducted using web browsers and/or other applications (apps) running on what are referred to herein as computing-and-communication devices (CCDs), and indeed are quite often conducted using web browsers and/or other apps running on a certain type of CCD that is referred to herein as a client device. Some example client devices include desktop computers, laptops, tablets, cell phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and the like.
Consumers typically conduct these e-commerce transactions using their respective client devices (and/or client devices that are available at locations such as coffee shops, Internet cafes, libraries, kiosks, and the like). The electronic data communications that are involved in the conducting of such transactions typically traverse one or more packet-switched data networks such as cellular networks, Wi-Fi networks, the Internet, and the like, and are typically conducted using, among other data-communication protocols, the network-layer (i.e., layer 3 of the Open Systems Interconnected (OSI) reference model (a.k.a. the OSI stack)) protocol known as the Internet Protocol (IP), usually together with a transport-layer (i.e., layer-4) protocol such as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), as examples.
When a consumer purchases a fashion article—whether by way of a brick-and-mortar transaction, an e-commerce transaction, or some other type of transaction, that consumer may or may not be the first consumer to purchase that fashion article (i.e., the first consumer to purchase that fashion article from its original manufacturer, designer, or the like). To wit, the consumer may be the first purchaser of that fashion article, or the consumer may be a subsequent purchaser (e.g., the second purchaser, the third purchaser, the fourth purchaser, etc.) of that fashion article.
Moreover, it is noted that, even in the context of a subsequent purchaser (e.g., a second purchaser that purchases a fashion article from the first purchaser), the corresponding fashion article could still be regarded as new. For example, if a given purse had never been used by its first purchaser, and perhaps even still had the retailer and/or manufacturer tags attached thereto, that purse may still be regarded as new. In other cases of subsequent purchasing, the corresponding fashion article may be considered used. Moreover, even fashion articles that are considered to be used can be in a variety of different conditions: some example condition designations include mint, very good, and good. And certainly numerous other possible condition designations could be used in reference to one or more used (or new) fashion articles.
There are some companies that engage (typically via their respective websites) in e-commerce transactions that involve subsequent purchases of fashion articles: examples include eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif.; TheRealReal, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif.; Twice of San Francisco, Calif.; Threadflip of San Francisco, Calif.; thredUP Inc. of San Francisco, Calif.; Poshmark, Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif.; Vaunte, Inc. of New York, N.Y.; Tradesy Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif.; Shop Hers, Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif.; Material Wrld, Inc. of New York, N.Y.; Fashion Project of Boston, Mass.; Bib and Tuck, Inc. of New York, N.Y.; Snobswap Inc. of Washington, D.C.; and Vestaire Collective of Paris, France. Moreover, some companies engage in brick-and-mortar reselling of, among other things, fashion articles: examples include Second Time Around of Boston, Mass. and Buffalo Exchange, LTD of Tucson, Ariz. Some companies engage in fashion-related e-commerce with a focus on saving money for the consumer: examples include Rent the Runway, Inc. of New York, N.Y.; Le Tote of San Francisco, Calif.; and Gilt Groupe Holdings, Inc. of New York, N.Y. Some companies engage in business-to-business (B2B) exchanges (i.e., bartering) of goods and services: one example is Bartercard USA Inc. of Charleston, S.C.